The Next Steps for the UE Community: The UE Dev Hub (Working Title)

On questions, there is an up arrow that replaces the <3 button, though functionally they work the same way. The idea being that for Q&A folks may prefer upvoting vs liking. If we find that’s not the case, we can always adjust it.

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Awesome! The learning portal has been amazing so far. Can’t wait

That’s not the case…
Someone can like a post that doesn’t need to be upvoted as an answer.

I wonder if it would not be better to choose if it is a question, when creating the post with a toggle button.

(EDIT) I was thinking of Discord (not liking it), discourse is good. At least the usage I’ve seen thus far from others.
I do like having one place and a common interface to access as much as we can.
Having knowledgeable C++/Blueprint people being able to respond to posts would be the most helpful.
Having Epic utilize the same source as we do would help level the playing field.

Loving the new knowledge base section on the forum with the summarized insights into internal roadmap Epic has re: UE systems, how to best use things etc… Really hoping it gets expanded on going forwards!

I’ve always thought some sort of middle ground between enterprise support (with UDN access) and regular licensees is needed. Currently it’s very difficult to gain insight into UE for any complex issue as hobbyists working on complicated systems or even the case for many small indie teams (often seen folks ask on the UE Slackers discord, relying on someone with UDN access to help them).

Understand why Epic can’t just open the floodgates to more direct access to problems (the amount of poor questions, issues that plague new users would be too much), so I’ve thought a curated read only view into UDN might be a good middle ground.

The new knowledge base I hope is built with something like that in mind, already it’s shown some interesting insight into Epic’s hopes re: UE5 that are very helpful for long term planning.

EDIT: To echo Arkiras’s points above re: formatting. Some of the links ex: the Unreal Gauntlet test framework primer article linked in this KB post, is on the UDN.

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At the moment, we’ve enabled the option in the top right drop down. We’ll reach out to see about a toggle in the composer.

Ah yes, we’re going through and updating them—these were a direct export for UDN. For that instance, the primer KB also came over so I’ve updated that link. Thanks for the feedback!

Still wondering about this. It would be great if tutorial makers could upload files to the hub for the tutorials. Other tutorial makers could then expand on existing systems and use these files as assets in their work. Like a marketplace of tutorial content.

And to strengthen this even further:

Is it a bad idea for EPIC to create some sorts of Megagrants for the best Tutorial makers?
An EPIC Educators Program Grant of sorts.

The grant program is pretty solid and compared to other things - like the judging of game jams - it is ran by serious people (probably because money is involved?). So a specific grant division ran by the same serious people would indeed be an A+ idea in my book.

The problem is the people doing tutorials who have no business even attempting to use the engine who will beg for consideration…
If you know the engine, you can’t avoid cringing every other minute of watching random YouTube tutorials… to the point there are really 3 to 4 creators out there you can somewhat trust…

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I would say there are a lot more than 3 to 4 creators who know what they are doing, but typically in very narrow fields, leaving a large portion of their series undesirable for real game development. They all have that one thing in common, that they have to do a lot of the same repetitive stuff, like animation blueprints, audio, basic UI , inventory, class inheritance, blueprint communication, some AI and other such things, not to forget math and the holy grail, optimization by default for each category, because it has been learned thoroughly over many months or few years.

Another totally overlooked aspect is to showcase the result at the beginning of the project and then build it up from a script without errors and too much talking. The art of teaching has very little to do with knowing the material.
Not to forget unfinished series…

These are too many things to learn and master by anyone, hence imagine this:
Someone wants to make a multiplayer FPS game, which quickly becomes dozens of skills to learn.

Why learn it all from one person, when the best in each field could teach each subject in a tree like setup?
Meaning: Once the character has been setup properly through one series from one creator, inventory, UMG, AI, sound etc. can be followed up on from someone else.
This would require that they would actually build upon a specific foundation.

As for specific use cases not covered in the tutorial, someone else could make a new tutorial on how to set the current template up in a different way, add new features, or even improve upon it.
Imagine a mind map where you choose, let’s say; “Single player racing game with realistic graphics and procedural music that reacts to game play events.”
That would then open up a path, all the way from “How to install the engine” and to “How to publish, market and monetize your game.” You then select which parts of that tree you need to study to get to your goal.

I use no more than five tutorial creators because they know what they are doing. The rest comes from gazillion sources.

And lastly, it would be great to see educational content in various skill levels, so that the noobs can get everything described, whereas the experienced ones can get an hour long video boiled down to three minutes and different levels in-between.

Or: EPIC would have verified tutorial makers making fresh content from the endless plethora of content from around the internet, saving everyone heaps of time and speeding up the quality and quantity of new UE products.

TLTR: I know this is a great idea, the execution however could be a massive headache.

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I’m not sure about all the rest, but the idea of collaborating on tutorials so that each of the 5 creators can focus on the specific specialty seems quite nice.

The problem is that there’s really only 5 creators we can trust - and often, even these 5 will have no idea what they are doing outside of their specific field of expertise. There really aren’t any good “generalists” making tutorials either.

I know why I don’t anymore - it’s a waste of time.

I’d rather work on my projects and get them finished instead of working at a 10 episode series of “how to beat the ue4 world composition into submission” tutorial that will literally be obsolete before release.

(To be fair, if I had ignored the BS they spewed in livestream and made this particular tutorial series anyway, it would have indeed been relevant to date. But when you have the people who make the engine say stuff like “we are removing this shortly” there’s really no point in making tutorials :confused: - regardless of the fact they didn’t remove anything still almost 2 years later)

Re the “beginner to advanced” thing.
Often in life you may consider yourself advanced at something yet find that you don’t know jack.

  • if the tutorials and livestreams were all properly structured with a solid format, then “advanced” users could still tune into the “noob” section at x2 speed and verify their knowledge.
    Perhaps even learn something new if the presenter knows their stuff and goes into details.

My problem with the current epic content is mostly the fact that the presenters themselves don’t know what they are doing outside of the script enough to not fall into issues when questions are asked.

The notable exceptions to this would usually be streams with Laurent, or Brucks… Which are also likely the most viewed videos anyway.

There’s also some good GDC talks that are noteworthy usually anything presented by Chris Murphy.

Usually - the technical writers (Hobson, Willard, etc) are also knowledgeable enough to present good content.

Usually, though niche, it’s good information presented by someone knowledgeable enough to make watching worth it.

The problem is those people haven’t bothered doing any live streams or tutorials in a long while - for all I know some don’t even work for epic anymore…

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It will be interesting to see where this goes with a solution for anyone to create tutorials.
I thought I would create battlefield 6 when I started out two years ago. The right place to start would have been to break that goal down into main parts and then each main part into sub-main parts and so forth until the first micro game would have been an empty character capsule with WASD and camera movement only. The second micro game the same, but with sprint, jump and crouch etc. etc.

I feel there might be a great demand for that kind of an approach, where one can learn exactly what they need, with links to deeper knowledge. All while focusing on that one thing one really loves and perhaps team up with others who have the same goal.

Had I known that back then, I’d have gone all in on procedural animation only. That stuff is super interesting.

For every indie game that never gets completed, 5-10% of a good team effort has gone to waste.
If the community or EPIC could somehow streamline these tiny bits of knowledge needed for each part of making a game, into paths for each interest, people could team up along the way and who knows, we might see tons of very interesting and unique products actually making it to market.

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If you’re looking for better ways to support the community, it would be nice to get an office response on this post: UE 5.0 Physics Inertia Persistence - major change from UE 4.26

Basically, UE5 seems to have changes some behavior which is critical to my game design, which has pretty much killed all my momentum on my project, because I can’t design a game until I know if I need to design around the new behavior, or if it is a regression that will be fixed.

It would be great if the tutorial makers could have a direct line to the engine devs who can answer questions and/or confirm that the information presented is accurate.

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They’d have to be epic employees then…
Not that that’s a bad thing, it’s just that they’d have to hire and task a special division for it.

As a grant receipent, epic gives me nothing different than what it gives everyone else…

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A place containing assets that were shown in some presentations would be a good thing.
I’m thinking about it after seeing this post: Inside Unreal: A Guided Tour of Gameplay Abilities - General / Events - Unreal Engine Forums, where the project files are located in this other post: A Guided Tour of Gameplay Abilities - Project Files - Announcements / Asset Sharing - Unreal Engine Forums

So I think that a place like the knowledge base (with categories), but containing all the presentations with (or without) project files and their respective files might be a good way. : )

This is another /dev/null effort. You should invest more on building content & managing them rather than creating tools from scratch.

No one would create tutorials, videos, or livestreams on your Hub unless they are paid. It’s so easy to use Youtube, Discord, Twitch & Tons of blog tools.

All you need to put dev/support team to listen to what people are talking about & respond to their issues.

So I understand there are only a subset of people who understand the engine well enough to offer solutions / advice in their respective aspects, including of course the developers of Unreal Engine. I agree with the above comment by Sigma Games; creating “…tiny bits of knowledge needed for each part of making a game.” This would be great.

I have another idea to add. Obviously games created by Epic are Epic’s IP and they’re all copyrighted. I’ve been trying to develop a game for the last year and a half and the number of different tutorials (Youtube videos, docs or websites) I’ve had to continually reference is crazy. Google search after google search is extremely time consuming. Of course, I’m new to the engine and learning all aspects of it so that’s understandable but some of the seemingly? more advanced topics I struggle to find.

I can try and look for workarounds, which might be fine but they will still take time. I was wondering if there was anyway the unreal engine programmers, artists, etc. could put together a repository of general code / blueprints or assets that solve certain issues that most game developers are likely to encounter. I know there exists a blueprint website (https://blueprintue.com/) but it’s lacking context.

For example, in my level I have eight candles and I want to turn on only four at a time, in a specific sequence. If I turn on anymore than that, the candles reset. If I get the sequence right, something happens. I’ve tried for weeks to get this to work to no avail. In other words, a general multi-conditional statement.

I would imagine a problem like mine would be a ten? minute block of code / blueprint for an experienced developer. Slap it on website with some comments and bam…no more questions on that issue. I’m also sure more than one person is trying to accomplish the same thing. I’m very aware that there is a learning curve with programming, level design, animation etc. and that many people go to school for these kinds of things which is why I appreciate the learning portal, but the more advanced topics I feel could build on the basics or be available from the start.

Look into blueprint interfaces. Doing what you want should maybe take 2 minutes. 4 minutes max.

The problem is that there’s is no community - and that the Wiki was deleted.

Given that, everyone learning should consider buying a book.
Which book, I have no idea at this point.
The engine changes so much (in a disastrous fashion) that writing a book in print is prettymuch pointless for anyone writing.
You’d need to spend your life writing corrections…

I tend to agree with Calrizien here.

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